Monday, October 21, 2013

Respond to the following poem, "Seven of Pentacles" by Marge Piercy: "Weave real connections."Extra experiential credit: While writing, put feet in the dirt. Fondle seeds. Put a harvested fruit or vegetable in your lap and breathe. Walk with a scythe. Feel the connections made. Have a pen and paper beside you. Write a poem.

remember the tags: poem, harvest, epic-earth, poet's moniker

The Seven Of Pentacles - Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soupshe is looking at her work growing away thereactively, thickly like grapevines or pole beansas things grow in the real world, slowly enough.If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to usinterconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

*****An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri
experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the
possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of
poems...

Sunday, October 20, 2013

I have awoken as rock to our storyIt's as plain as day to meYou and I have always been rocksolid, laying against each other as millenia move within usbirthing consciousness into bodyexquisite exhalation expandingas time breathes through usthe inner layers resonating deeplyas fire and heat conceive new formdiamond, rose quartz, jasper, goldOur story is older than words or eyesour veins beg us to remembermy womb cries it's earth quakeyour love rocks me fullmineralizing our tongues, we kissupheavaling, we fold togetheremerging, rising out of the watersour ancient forms soften, smoothedby the rich tastes of song eternalwe move our bodies toward the sunintertwined, resting, deeply peaceful ~ another animista poem from my archives ~ this is what the muse offers for this prompt ~ 25 May 1997

Friday, October 18, 2013

Jogging along a gravel road that runs along a saltmarshI spotted a long-billed curlew about to spear a mud crabwhen a red fox suddenly intervened, wringing its gloved paws.
"Stop this madness!" it exclaimed. "I warn you, crueltywill consume you, and your children's childrenwill inherit your crazed bloodlust!"
The curlew stared with minuscule eyes as cold as asteroidsthen skewered the crab straight through its shell and raised it to the sky.The fox picked up a muddy stone and hurled it, but missed.
The curlew gave thanks, consumed the crab,then, flying toward the sun, vanished like a dream with wings.I jogged on, indifferent to the ways of wild things.
The fox ran up beside me. "You must die," it said, "for youhave seen a thing that humans mustn't know."It bit me in the tendon. I fell. It lunged at my bare throat.
We grappled in the mud until I managed to subdue itby knocking it against a stump until, stunned and bleeding,it lay quite still. "Now listen," I hissed, for I could tell
it was only playing dead -- "You think I have no soulbecause I'm Man. Well, darn it, you're wrong.I listen to Coltrane too, just like the rest of you."
"Coltrane?" it said. "You know Coltrane?" It's eyesgrew wide with fear. "How could you - a mortal -understand?"I whistled a bit of A Love Supreme. It wept.
I offered it my handkerchief. It blew its nose, then gave it back.It offered me its magic boots, which I refused.(How could I write poems with magic boots? That's cheating.)
We argued a bit. It was convinced that Coltrane wasn't Manbut was the manifestation of the soul of Wolfdescended from the heavens.
We agreed to disagree. I jogged home, scratched and bleeding.My wife scolded me for playing with undomesticated foxesand insisted I get rabies shots and new glasses.
I said she should listen to Coltrane more, and stop wasting her time on Facebook.She didn't understand. How could she? She never jogs on gravel roadsand besides, she's only human.

Friday, October 4, 2013

she say the dirt writes poems, the stones speakshe say it's all alivewrite a poem from that, animista

tags: animista, epic-earth, poem, <poet's moniker>

An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri
experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the
possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of
poems...

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

All morning the clouds and their mysterious shadows
drifted constant as a pod of whales
across the soggy hills.
For hours I sat and watched
and eventually stopped thinking of them as whales,
imagining them instead as voluptuous brides
in billowing white dresses
wafting down a petal-strewn knoll,
which caused me to think of honeymoons,
then coastlines, romantic resorts,
candlelight and sex.
To get my mind off sex
I thought about God, who made the world
and cumulus clouds and
Adam and Eve in Eden,
naked and not the least ashamed,
which got me thinking about sex again
as the blooming clouds and their shadows
flowed on and on.
Then, after long silence, I heard the plane,
its lonely drone, as trifling
as a far off bee.
I thought little of it. The clouds held my gaze.
Then suddenly the airplane's shadow
pounced on me from behind,
enveloped me like a swift eclipse,
then shot like a leopard away.
A rare occurence:
five or six times, at most,
have I been darkened by an airplane’s shadow.
One’s could measure one’s life
by such unlikelihoods.
Indeed, I do.
Each time it happens I ponder
how many foreshadowings remain.
Only the shadow of an airplane
could get me thinking about death
on such an exquisite day.